Emergency & I

If if read the reviews (by users and critics) Emergency & I by indie rock band Dismemberment Plan is one of the best albums of the 1990s. I totally missed it, but I don't support the hype. It's a nice album with sometimes weak vocals, but good ideas. "A Life of Possibilities", "What Do You Want Me to Say?", "You Are Invited" and "The City" are great songs and several others are ok too, but nothing exceptional. Still a meager four stars though.

Took a few years to get into this LP, but the payoff was more than worth the wait. Hard to identify any other 90s band that can top the ageless idiosyncrasy and post-punk perfection of Dismemberment Plan – this LP sounds fresh to this day, partly for how sonically distinct and off-kilter it is. There's a perfect blend of early grunge/noise rock and angular post-punk guitar here that blends together seamlessly thanks to the band's chaotic, spastic delivery. Tracks pivot on a dime from soft and reflective to completely discordant, a bipolar slant that makes the album feel alive and unpredictable. I still find new corners to get lost in every time I run through this LP, just one of those albums that continues to give nearly three decades on. Great add, felt DP was a huge blind spot for the official 1001 alongside Hum and other 90s' noise rock greats.

Best Song: What Do You Want Me to Say? One of the few songs in the album that felt like it had an internal direction. Worst Song: 8 1/2 Minutes. Songs from the dentists office. Overall: This was too scattered for my liking. It reminded me of a less cohesive Mars Volta. Everything felt very chaotic, and obviously this chaos was intentional, but for whatever this particular instantiation of chaos was frustrating to me. I never felt like I had any place to get my bearings, it was all confronting noise without direction.

An all-timer

This album sounds surprisingly fresh thirty years later, which is rarer than it should be. The Dismemberment Plan sit somewhere between math rock, Fugazi, and indie pop, and they make that combination entirely their own. What impresses most is that these are Musicians with a capital M, but every technical decision is in service of the songs rather than the performance. The rhythms are irregular, the arrangements restless and creative, and none of it ever shows off. It just makes the songs better. The lyrics carry a great deal of wisdom that a twenty-something could identify with, which is possibly why the album holds up where so many of its contemporaries don't. The emotional range is remarkable too, moving between anxiety, alienation, playfulness and vulnerability. One caveat: The voice is an acquired taste and occasionally grating. The fact that the album still lands this well despite that says everything about the strength of what surrounds it. An album I'll be returning to. And an actual contender for the original list.

Classic. Love it. One of those albums where I always come out of a listen with a new favorite song. It's chaotic, but in the right way. Last.fm says it's one of my most listened to albums of all time, so I'd be lying to myself if I rated it anything but a 5/5.

1999, Indie Rock Single: What Do You Want Me to Say? Standouts: A Life of Possibilities, What Do You Want Me to Say. Rating: 3.5

I am quite a huge fan of the D.C. post-hardcore scene from the nineties, yet I consider that Dismemberment Plan fall a league under the more prominent names associated to that time and place. I guess the vinyl reissue of *Emergency & I* in the early 2010s did a lot of good to their reputation. But it might also have made this record somewhat... overrated? Harsh take? Maybe... Yet both the assets and the warts in the album seem so obvious to me. I am gonna try to break them down in five paragraphs (three for the warts, and two for the assets)... Composition-wise, *Emergency & I* is far less convincing than anything ever written by Fugazi -- around half of the songs in this tracklist feel like they're pasting parts next to each other that shouldn't be pasted next to each other. It's especially obvious in the opener "A Life Of Possibilities". The composition work done by Fugazi -- especially in their later albums such as *Red Médecine* or *The Argument* -- could go from atmospheric to totally unhinged (sometimes in the same song), but there was also an internal logic to that variety that I can't always find in that Dismemberment Plan album. An eerie track such as "The Jitters" goes nowhere decisive, for instance. Like-minded cuts in *The Argument* certainly don't do that. DP also took a page out of The Nation Of Ulysses book for the crazier cuts such as "Girl O'Clock", but here again, the band fails to leave an equally impactful mark in my ears. Melody-wise, Jawbox generally carried a more impactful heft than Dismemberment Plan. You have the same indie-rock-adjacent intents in the latter's artistry, but those intents are too often muddled by the experimental ones -- which are not necessarily well-calibrated themselves, as suggested earlier. There's still a nice contrast between the tension of the verses and the release of the choruses in the more straightforward songs (example: the all-around great "What Do You Want Me To Say?, but more on that later...). The thing is, when DP don't apply that formula they seem a little lost as to what it is they should actually do. Energy-wise, I take issue with some of the more stilted and overaffected moments in this record. Here comes the part played by a flaw that has been noticed by quite a few other users in this section: the vocals. I wouldn't dare to say they are "grating", but they do sound a little weak, or even "forced" on a track such as "Gyroscope". And given the "chatty" lyrical contents, it's a flaw that's hard not to notice. For both those sorts of vocals and that sort of borderline "dance-rock" energy, I vastly prefer a band from that scene named Q And Not U -- criminally forgotten today. The vocals and music of that band had the same youthful energy to them, but said energy came out so much more naturally and organically. Please check them out if you're interested in that overall music style. Now the assets: the textures harnessed by Dismemberment Plan sure were original for that day and age, and they made the sound of this album age very well. I still feel it's the sort of asset that made fans of this band favor style over substance to an extent, but that's obviously a very subjective thing to say, so it's not as if I want to die on that hill either. Let's be clear, *Emergency & I* already had its two feet firmly planted in the 21st Century. If Dismemberment Plan drew obvious inspiration from the elders and peers of that scene they were a part of, they took great care not aping them either. "Going back and forth" indeed... Those synths in "Spiders In The Snow", for instance... How marvellous they are, and how out-of-the-box for that sort of band. Truly commendable. And as someone very perceptive in this section already said, you can also smell the whiffs of what The Mars Volta would pull off a few years down the line in this record... To conclude about the assets, and to put it as simply as I can, you still have a batch of good songs or very interesting compositions in the tracklist of this album, in between the stuff that made me scratch my head in puzzlement. Those good songs / good compositions are "What Do You Want Me To Say?", "Spider In The Snow", "You Are Invited", "The City", "8 1/2 Minutes" and "Back And Forth". Too bad that DP flub the album's entrance for me, and that the valleys in the tracklist sort of make me forget the peaks at times. But that's still half of said tracklist comprising good songs in my book, and it's not as if the valleys are horrible either. Hence my final, very benevolent grade: 3.5/5 for the purposes of this list dedicated to essential albums, rounded up to 4. 8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 for the musicianship and production values + 1.5 for the artistry) ---- Number of albums from the original list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 465 Albums from the original list I *might* include in mine later on: 288 Albums from the original list I won't include in mine: 336 ---- Number of albums from the users list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 117 Albums from the users list I *might* select for mine later on: 122 Albums from the users list I won't select for mine: 273 (including this one). ---- Émile, *quatre* nouveaux messages pour toi au dessus, du *Solid State Survivor* de Yellow Magic Orchestra au *Atrocity Exhibition* de Danny Brown

This sounds indie, all right

It's not what I expected- seemingly disjointed and random but engaging. It's ODD and I mean that in a good way. Certainly not derivative or drab. It's interesting to see what direction they are going track by track.

Ooh, new band for me, but definitely in the genres I like. I may come back to this one, but was pretty good for my first listen.

Interesting and kind of curvy musical ride. I liked it.

Classic

Rating: 7/10 Best songs: A life of possibilities, What do you want me to say, I love a magician

A genuinely innovative and influential indie album, and I can see why it’s so highly regarded. But its deliberately chaotic, genre-hopping sound feels a bit all over the place to me, some great moments, but ultimately not an album I’ll be rushing back to.

"Mom, can I have anxiety?" "No, we have anxiety at home" Anxiety at home: At first, the music was jarring to me, but it does a really good job of conveying someone having a panic or anxiety attack. I just hope that was the intention.

I remember when this album came out and never really listened to it. Reading about it now, I'm surprised that this is so critically acclaimed, both then and now. It seems like this has incredibly staying power. This album to me certainly rocks, but just sounds like a bridge between pop punk and indie. I am having a hard time hearing what it so ground breaking about this, but it's probably more of a "needed to be there" type thing. This was enjoyable enough for sure.

Nothing new or this genre, done by other more prominent bands. It's okay, but nothing to get excited about.

This was just alright. Decent, but nothing special. 3 stars

A missing link between 90s and 00s indie alt rock

Well it’s cute and short I guess. I like whenever a lead singer has kind of a unique voice. Overall unremarkable but not off putting

Not as violent as their name makes them sound. There was something I enjoyed here, but the fact that I can't remember what it was means that it can't have been that enjoyable.

I think I need to hear this again before making a proper review. I didn't dislike it, but this is very much a holding response until I've finished the list and/or get bored and revisit stuff I've said I need to revisit.

Clearly there is foundational stuff in indie rock going on here given its release date. This does suffer from that problem.of, in coming to this band late, there is a strong and likely unfair sense of been there, done that. I enjoyed it, but while maybe innovative in its time I'm not sure it's quite great.

I definitely listened but I can’t have heard it. No idea other than I can’t have hated it.